Drawn to the Rhythm: A Passionate Life Reclaimed - Softcover

Hall, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393324540 ISBN 13: 9780393324549

Verlag: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The inspiring story of one woman's journey of healing and transformation. Sara Hall's life seemed perfect: a wealthy husband, a big house in an affluent suburb, three healthy children. But the surface of Hall's life hid a marriage filled with sorrow and pain. One day, at age forty-two, Hall sees a lone figure rowing in the harbor, and that image becomes her holy grail. In this richly layered memoir, the author tells how her determination to master rowing a single shell gave her the courage to free herself from the dark forces of abuse in her childhood and the failure of her marriage. In lyrical prose, Hall describes the rigors of rowing, the elation of winning, the joy of total engagement in passionate enterprise, and the triumph of breaking free. Ultimately, she declares sovereignty over her life and wins a world championship gold medal. Drawn to the Rhythm is a brave and soulful book, written for all women who seek to find their strength and voice. 16 pages of b/w photographs

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sara Hall is the 1998 World Masters Champion in the women's single shell. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts, and continues to row competitively.

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Drawn to the Rhythm

A Passionate Life ReclaimedBy Sara Hall

W. W. Norton & Company

Copyright © 2003 Sara Hall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0393324540

Chapter One

FIRST
RACE

That morning in June 1996 when I pushed my tiny borrowed racing shell away from the launch dock for the thousand-meter journey down to the start line, I thought I might faint. The voice shouting encouragement from shore as I took my first strokes downstream was not my mother calling from the knot of swim team moms, a memory from thirty years before, but the reedy voice of my own eleven-year-old daughter, Janie, dressed in pale yellow overalls and a white T-shirt, pigtails flying behind her as she ran through the spectators along the bank of the Hudson in downtown Albany. "Go, Mommy, go get 'em!" The wind blew her little voice to me in gusts. Go, Mommy. I was about to race for the first time in thirty years, the first time since 1966, when I had pulled on my red rubber swim cap, adjusted my black Speedo, and crouched on the block for the start of the fifty-meter butterfly, my face expectant and upturned, a thirteen-year-old girl eager for the gun and the plunge into adolescence. Now, after the currents of adulthood, marriage, and motherhood had carried me thousands of miles from that starting block on the pool's edge, I was finally ready to put myself on the line once again, this time in a racing shell?a woman of almost forty-three with three days of lessons, a year of solitary practice, and a borrowed boat. It was the most frightening thing I'd ever done. Ever.

    Rowing away from the dock that early morning in June, I felt unreal, disembodied. Like eleven years before when they had wheeled me into the operating room to give birth to my first child, Janie, by Caesarian, and I thought, You have no choice, this is going to happen whether you're brave or not, and the obstetrician had said, "You're going to feel a little pinch," which meant, "Now I'm going to stick a long needle into your spine and it's going to hurt like hell" You've chosen this, I told myself, so summon courage, take a deep breath. Race this race.

    I'd first picked up an oar almost exactly a year before. In the winter after that first summer of floundering and thrashing, flipping the boat again and again like every other novice, I discovered that I was more deeply in love with rowing than anything but the sight of my newborns face, and that something long hidden and long waiting in myself was urging?no, demanding?that I race the single shell. It was as if I were suddenly locked onto a course newly discovered but eternally fated for me, like a Greek hero setting out on the journey that will ultimately transform and define him even though he might rather stay home pressing olives. What was I thinking of, I wondered in the months leading to Albany, I who had convinced myself that the small contentments of getting my library books in on time and keeping my roses free of Japanese beetles were reward enough in a life that had become far tighter and smaller than I could bear to recognize?

    With my three lessons, a year of reading all the books on rowing my reference librarian could get me from the New York State interlibrary loan system, and a season of earnestly hacking at the water of my home harbor, my skill and balance were still marginal: for me, a good workout was one in which I didn't capsize or run broadside into a moored fishing boat. Yet I was planning to race a twenty-seven-foot, ten-inch-wide boat up a swollen river littered with half-submerged logs and old tires, threading my way past safety buoys marking a course between a pair of massive railroad pylons. Where was the ancient robed chorus telling me: "Go back! Go back before it's too late"?

    As I rowed to the start and began to feel the ticking of minutes and seconds accelerating toward the moment in which I would sit in that fragile boat on the line, I told myself that the task was to stay upright and cross the finish. That's it. Beating someone was, if not the last thing on my mind, at least far down on the list. Higher was fear of the infamous physical pain of racing a shell and a nagging conviction that if I'd never been brave enough to stand up for myself at home, how could I have what it took to go the distance on a race course.

    And there were other very real worries: muscle failure at fifteen hundred meters from maintaining a death hold on the oar handles; broken bones and boat damage from rowing full-steam into a monumentally unyielding stone bridge abutment; or, finally, "catching a crab," the term for feathering an oar too soon, flipping the boat, and catapulting the rower into icy waters.

    When I look back, I remember with an ache how ardent, earnest, and frighteningly incompetent I was in Albany.

    The day before the race, Janie and I drove down to the boathouse on Lloyd Harbor, Long Island, and loaded S4, the sturdy fiberglass, club-owned boat which was my daily companion, on top of our faded blue station wagon. We strapped down the old-fashioned macon oars with blue bungee cords, and taped a red bandana as tail flag on S4's tapered stern. When the moment came an hour later to kiss the baby and eight-year-old goodbye, I felt like a woman in the first stages of labor, wanting to cry, No, this is too frightening, there's too much risk, I want everything to stay as it is. But Janie, who was excited about her new responsibilities as my support crew, had a firm grip.

    "Okay, Mommy," she said as we stood next to the car in the driveway of our suburban house on Long Island. "I've got enough Diet Coke and Janet Jackson tapes for about three hours. And I've got my retainer and my overnight bag." I looked at her overnight bag. It was pink and had a picture of ballet slippers on the front. "You have all your stuff, Mom? Your racing shirt, the tape for your knees?" I did. So I gave the baby-sitter the emergency numbers one last time, then we were off: past the library, past the elementary school, past the mouth of our safe little harbor.

    Just past the New Hyde Park exit on the Long Island Expressway, when we had been underway about twenty minutes, I burst into tears. It seemed I had waited for this moment since standing on the starting block on the edge of the pool Adolescence and adulthood had been a confusion of sorrow and self-doubt, yet here I was, finally, my red tail flag flying, my bow jauntily plowing through the humid June afternoon. Janie opened a can of Cherry Coke, handed it to me, and put on a tape. We opened the windows and sang at the top of our lungs. Silly things?old Beatles, Janet Jackson. We sang and sang, laughed and laughed, lost our way past the George Washington Bridge and decided to cut from the Palisades Parkway to the New York Thruway on a two-lane road.

    Suddenly we found ourselves in a quiet, luminously verdant forest in the New Jersey countryside. The two-lane road we chose led us winding up steep hillsides and down into misted green vales, a mythic landscape suspended between city and highway. Janie and I fell silent with the mystery of it, S4 still tracing its course over our heads. It was like a dream, as if we had been blessed by the Good Witch of the East and were following a yellow brick road to some long-sought home of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: W. W. Norton & Company
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0393324540
• ISBN 13: 9780393324549
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 306
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland